Our first stop after 40 minutes was the Curaçao liqueur distillery
where we were given a tour and then a modest tasting - not our usual drink at
9am!
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| The oranges they use have a green peel. They say the location of the orange grove is secret but such a thing must be hard to keep secret |
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| Our guide |
We toyed with the idea of getting some blue Curacao to take home as it’s
only on the island that you can buy the real McCoy.
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| Some of the declared ingredients |
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| Still in use to keep the quality of the product consistent |
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| Labelling in progress |
However the bottles that are designed to feel
like orange peel have such thick glass and are so heavy that we felt a bottle
would take up half someone’s baggage allowance so abandoned the idea.
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| More labelling in progress |
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| One bottle would seem to be missing! |
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| That's my sort of tester! |
They did sell half bottles of blue Curaçao
but they were sold out wherever we went.
Anais explained that Curaçao is a very diverse island and
has just about every religion represented.
She told us that nobody minds what you do within the law as long as you love the island and contribute.
There are 4 official languages – Papiamento, the local language
with slight variations on each of the 3 islands, Dutch, English and
Spanish. Papiamento is a mix of many
languages but one guide described it as Afro-Portuguese. It had certainly
struck us before then that there were some elements of Portuguese in it. 'Hello', for example is 'Bom dia' – the
Portuguese phrase
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| Atlantic Internet cable-laying ship |
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| View from the (expensive) souvenir shop |
Google describes Papiamento as ‘a Spanish Creole language
with admixtures of Portuguese and Dutch, spoken on the islands of Aruba,
Bonaire and Curaçao’. Creole means of
mixed European and black descent, especially in the Caribbean and, in terms of
language, a mother tongue formed from the contact of two languages through an
earlier pidgin stage. In turn, ‘pidgin’
is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two
or more groups that do not have a language in common. Typically is vocabulary and grammar are
limited and drawn from several languages.
Don’t say these blogs don’t try to educate you
readers out there!
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